


Our Hearts are Closets Full of Cages

by Trapelo_Road475



Category: The Mentalist
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2012-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-21 22:45:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/602912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trapelo_Road475/pseuds/Trapelo_Road475
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For a mentalist-kink prompt on LJ.  Prompter wanted 'a fic where Rigsby hugs Jane'.  </p>
<p>The team fails to mind Patrick properly, and there are consequences.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Our Hearts are Closets Full of Cages

Wayne Rigsby is smarter than most people would give him credit for, at first glance. He plays the big dumb jock, and it's not totally untrue - he is big, and he played baseball into high school, and hockey, and he would've played soccer longer but he couldn't seem to stop hitting the other kids maybe on purpose. But you don't get to adulthood when your dad's a drunk with a temper and quick fists if you're not smart enough to learn when to run, when to hide, and when to stand. Wayne Rigsby likes being a big, dumb jock sometimes. He's not a bully, like his dad was, he just can't stand it when bad guys want to hurt his co-workers. His friends. He's lucky, at CBI, almost everyone can take care of themselves.

Except Jane. Who isn't exactly stupid, who might, in some ways, be the smartest in the office (Wayne won't tell him that, won't give him the satisfaction, doesn't want to see the blank, cheerful well-of-course look on Patrick's face) - except that Jane doesn't have a goddamn lick of self-preservation. None. He's wily and he's sly but he just does things, and most of the time he's clever and lucky enough to jump the hoops of fire he lights for himself without getting scorched, but it stops Wayne's heart in his chest every. Single. Time. Not just with worry. With anger. Patrick Jane does things with this manic, perilously self-assured attitude, half as if he knows he'll survive and half as if he doesn't care.

Like that time with the crazy woman locking him in her basement and _cattle-prodding_ him for days, or that time with the abandoned hotel, with those film students and Red John, the times Patrick goes wild-eyed and frantic and almost pleads with Lisbon that they _almost had him,_ Red John, and if the team hadn't bothered with _caring about him,_ they'd have got the bastard, and everything would be ok. Wayne watches him then, tense and trembling about the eyes and something echoes in him, like a deep low cry over nightblack water, and he sees Patrick for the cornered animal he is. You don't have to be psychic to know, and he doesn't have to be an Einstein to know that Patrick would deny it up down and sideways with that pretty, scrunch-eyed smile of his. But sometimes Wayne sees that animal, the one snarling at the hands that tend its wounds, the one with the whites of its eyes flashing bright, too mad with hurt and determination.

They really know nothing about him. His wife, his daughter are dead. Red John's doing. He sees himself as responsible. He grew up on the midway. They know nothing. Patrick is the scene of an arson, the heat, the flames still licking, and everything hidden under white ash and smoke. Red John lit the thing for sure but it would be just like Patrick to have placed the tinder himself, kindly, patiently, all tar and twine in secret places.

Sometimes Wayne wants to know him and sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes he wants the laughing reminisces, sometimes he wants the fury, sometimes he wants the grief - he wants. To see it. To see something. Smug bastard, smug bastard who doesn't care enough about himself to care that when he gets himself in trouble he hurts them, too.

One dry late summer (the sky a blue and cloudless sheet stretched taut and not unlike Patrick's eyes) they get a simple murder on their desks, a murder that in three days multiplies, spirals, stretches intricate and subtle trails across a dozen small, dry towns that choke in their own dust and in the blood, too, the iron smell that lingers, that won't come off your clothes or hands that settles in your nose and mouth. Wayne keeps checking his tie for bloodstains. Patrick wanders the crime scenes like golden dust on a sunbeam or some delirious bird. They sweat in fields and shiver in barns that haven't held animals in decades.

Wayne doesn't watch him closely enough. Patrick doesn't sleep. They are - Lisbon reminds them - to mind him, to corral him, but try to be subtle because he's an adult and he can make his own stupid decisions and he's also an ex-fake-psychic and he sees right through them as if they were shop windows. Patrick doesn't sleep even more than he usually does and Wayne doesn't pay enough attention and they lose him, somewhere in the trampled fields and sagging barns and the distant burr of insects.

It takes another week of searching, of drawing the fine threads of the murders together, to close the loop, to find Patrick, to find the killer, whose wife (an eerily fine and patient woman who has a smile like a hotel painting) has a cousin who used to work at a county hospital near Chico that has been closed for a decade and when they arrive, the stucco buildings have settled into the dirt like teeth and bones. The sun is low and striking brass.

Jane is shirtless and shoeless and beltless and handcuffed to a table that Wayne pretends is not an autopsy table (and there is no bank of a half-dozen refrigerated drawers on one wall, either) just a metal table bolted to the floor and what scares him right down to the hair on his balls is that Jane doesn't say a goddamn thing when the flashlight hits his face. Doesn't even blink. He's just there. He doesn't even look like Jane. Wayne isn't used to seeing so much human skin there - there should be a shirt and a vest and if possible a jacket but there isn't, there is only tight and hairless flesh scraped and scalded and scarred and stretched over too-prominent ribs. Jane breathes. That calm quiet in-beat-out-beat-in-beat-out that he does when he's hypnotizing someone.

Wayne realizes he's hypnotized himself.

Once Jane tried to teach him how to pick handcuffs. _Oh, it's simple, just like this,_ he'd said, as if it was something a child could do, as if lock-picking was something they taught in Carny kindergarten along with ABC's and rigging games of chance. 

Wayne tries to pick the locks on the cuffs that bind Jane (who does not look like Jane - he looks like _Patrick,_ sickeningly human and disturbingly fragile on the dirty metal table) and he is shaking and he _can't_ , he can't remember, and he tries to ask Jane but he doesn't answer so Wayne talks to him as if he's trying to annoy him.

He talks about baseball. How he pretends to like the Giants but he's really a Blue Jays fan and always has been. Since he was a kid. It was his first little league team, back when the coaches pitched. He lost the hat when he went into foster care but it was the first thing he bought when he moved into his own place after college. A Blue Jays hat. Do you like baseball, Jane? No, of course you don't. You wouldn't know a catcher from a culvert, would you, Jane? You don't know what a fastball is or a knuckle-ball or what a double play is or a force or the infield fly rule. Do you, Jane?

"Say something."

Wayne sweats over the locks. He has called the team on the walkie but the hospital sprawls over the low hills and he is deep in the cold, damp basement where the walls sweat a crystal shine under his flashlight.

"Patrick, please."

Patrick is watching him. From somewhere deep. Wayne knows that place. The place inside where you escape when you can't run. He was probably never so good at it as Patrick is; he always felt the blows anyway. He wants to shoot the handcuffs. He doesn't want to hurt Patrick.

What did Patrick say?

A paperclip he pulled off a file and stuck in his pocket absently is in his hand and unbent and he jams it frantic and unskilled into the lock.

What did Patrick say?

( _Nothing._ Because he's a crazy smug bastard wild animal blue eyes damp curls blood dark on his skin bruises or dirt or both and what've they goddamn done to him.)

One cuff clicks free. Then the ankle cuff. Prison quality, hardened steel. The kind of restraints they keep in a locker at the office for transfers. The perversity of their misuse strikes bile in his throat.

Patrick doesn't move. He breathes.

"We've got you," Wayne says. "You're safe okay?"

Patrick blinks once, as if coming from a great depth, and smiles his perfect disarming smile but his voice is a thick and clotted rasp and he hacks and spits blood and mucous down his chin and on his chest -

"Of course I am. It did take you long enough. It was the wife, I told you from the start, it was her idea."

Patrick is trying to sit up and be Jane again.

This is like the abandoned hotel and the crazy woman cattle-prodding him and Red John doing god knows what to him that he wouldn't talk about but he was worse than usual for _months_ about touch he even got suspended once when a guy who wasn't even a suspect just tapped him on the shoulder _excuse me you dropped -_ and got a punch in the teeth for it. The animal had got out and Jane crushed it, hissing, back into its cage.

Wayne doesn't want that again. Doesn't want it to be worse all over again. He knows what happens when you swallow glass.

He grabs Patrick (Patrick, human, vulnerable, heart at a gallop) and hugs him hard and Patrick panics, jerks against him, and Wayne can smell him, sweat and fear and cold skin and blood and mold and moss and concrete.

Once a long time ago a very large man with very kind eyes touched his thin shoulder and told him no one would ever hurt him again. Wayne, just thirteen, had judged him a liar with all the fatalistic certainty of a child.

Wayne won't lie to Patrick. He will be hurt. He will probably never stop hurting. Wayne doesn't want to hurt him again by lying. Wayne hates people who hurt his friends. It makes him want to break things.

In the dark (the flashlight lies abandoned on the floor and casts high white light on the metal doors of the silent drawers and sends reflections to the cold walls like whispers. Someone has painted WELCOME TO HELL PAY YOR TOLLS on the cinderblock wall) in Wayne's arms Patrick makes a sound like a wounded animal or a frightened human. There are lacerations on his skin that have split in his struggle and ooze slickly onto Wayne's jacket and fingers.

Patrick is human here and it scares him but he doesn't care. He just holds on. He just holds hard. Wayne will not give him back to his hypnotic dark.

He heard Lisbon tell him off once for being an idiot, that people cared about him. He heard Patrick argue back in fervent certainty that people who got close to him got hurt and badly. Lisbon had cast up her hands because how did you argue with someone who wanted to die but kept it secret even from himself?

Wayne touches Patrick and Patrick trembles because he has been hurt.

It's a terrifying thing. But a human thing. A human thing is not so awful. A human thing is better than the lie.


End file.
